Great LessWrong posts often stick in people’s minds and continue to be reread and shared for years after they are published
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
Illustrative counterpoint: How many early-days-lesswrong articles were lost to time?
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
ergo I’d amend your ‘you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post’ to ‘to be a good lesswrong post’.
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
Not speaking for Zach but I definitely don’t think LessWrong is unique here. I think the public-facing nature and relative timelessness is key, whether it’s a LessWrong post, a blog post, a microsite, a paper on Arxiv, or a book[1].
Social media like Twitter and Reddit are somewhere in between.
Indeed books have many of the advantages I think of as centrally LW’s advantage over GDocs in that they’re more public, more legible, can reach more people, etc. They also have major disadvantages as well, of course.
LessWrong posts are often designed to be timeless, which is why great LessWrong posts can be reread for years.
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. fwiw great writings outside LessWrong don’t automatically get reread.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book, whose author worked for years to build it up into a brand. That’s very different from a Google doc, which is what Zach was contrasting with.
I suspect that this is true not because Lesswrong is better than any other publishing platform, but rather because of a broader ‘rich get richer’ effect applied to good articles, and a survivorship bias.
Illustrative counterpoint: How many early-days-lesswrong articles were lost to time?
Illustrative contrapoint: Rich Dad Poor Dad was not a lesswrong article and is still incredibly well known.
ergo I’d amend your ‘you should often aim for the final output of a project to be a LessWrong post’ to ‘to be a good lesswrong post’.
Definitely share stuff on lesswrong though. :)
Not speaking for Zach but I definitely don’t think LessWrong is unique here. I think the public-facing nature and relative timelessness is key, whether it’s a LessWrong post, a blog post, a microsite, a paper on Arxiv, or a book[1].
Social media like Twitter and Reddit are somewhere in between.
Indeed books have many of the advantages I think of as centrally LW’s advantage over GDocs in that they’re more public, more legible, can reach more people, etc. They also have major disadvantages as well, of course.
LessWrong posts are often designed to be timeless, which is why great LessWrong posts can be reread for years.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. fwiw great writings outside LessWrong don’t automatically get reread.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book, whose author worked for years to build it up into a brand. That’s very different from a Google doc, which is what Zach was contrasting with.